This depends on your language of choice a lot but even still I don’t know how much I agree with it.

It’s not at all obviously wrong on the surface, there is some setup involved in the sense you’re bringing at a minimum one new tool into your build process but you are picking up a LOT in exchange for that trade off from prebuilt client libraries down to an extremely efficient wire format.

RPC using JSON sounds like the worst of both worlds to me. You ended up trading away a huge amounts of the benefits for things like code generation and general efficiency for a pretty reasonably one time setup cost.

Maybe that’s different for the language of your choice I don’t know…